What is the dot in a circle icon on my Windows Phone?

One of the troubles with running a dedicated Windows Phone site is that you need to cater to the pro users and the new folks who have just picked up their first device. This post is for them, the new people.

On Windows Phone 8 you may often see a little dot-in-a-circle icon appear in the upper right hand side on your screen. It seemingly pops up randomly and due to the amount of forum threads on the matter, it has caused some confusion. So what is it?...

It's simply the GPS icon alerting you to the fact that an app at that moment is pulling down your location.

Often this will happen with some weather apps that use your at-the-moment location (as opposed to fixed) for the current weather conditions. In fact, in Windows Phone 8 apps that use geolocation information can freely run in the background (e.g. Nokia Drive) and of course apps can run periodically for updates to the Live Tile. Anytime that is happening, you'll see the little dot in a circle icon appear.

This means you may see the icon when in an app or sometimes just when you are on your Start screen. If it's the latter case, that just means an app in the background is updating and accessing your location at that moment.

In short, it's nothing to be alarmed about unless you don't want your GPS services running (you can always disable them system wide via Settings --> Location). Just pay attention when you are setting up an app for the first time. All Windows Phone apps are required to ask for permission before accessing your location, so it's on you to click yes or no.

For further reference, you can peep the chart below posted by Nokia. This chart shows all of the Windows Phone 8 icons that may pop up on your phone (including HTC, Samsung, etc.).

I learned the hard way that the "vibrate" icon and the baconit notification icon look exactly alike. Spent a good 10 minutes trying to maddeningly trying to figure out what baconit wanted to notify me before I noticed the phone was on vibrate. LOL.

Correction regarding apps using GPS – they're not required to prompt you first, they're only required to give you an option somewhere in the app to turn it off. If they use location then the Marketplace prompts you at install, and any futher prompts are just the courtesy of the developers.

Just my 2 cents,,,
This DOT symbol will show periodically even if you turn all background apps which use geolocation.
GPS is used by "Find my Phone" feature for Windowsphone and the only way to turn it off is by going ito settings an turning all your location services off.
I hope this helps!

Yea I still can't figure what app or system service is accessing it. First I though it was the NY times app, then a weather app (that I turned location checking off in the app setting but thought maybe the app wasn't working), then IE, but really I have no idea, and no way to tell. Grrr

The battey saver icon is cute but it blocks your view of the battery level unless it's full or empty. Since you turn that on when you are concerned about battery life, it's frustrating that you can no longer see your battery level.

It has its uses. Eg, going away for the weekend and wanting to keep as much juice as possible. It's easier to temporarily activate batter saving than go through and turn all the apps and email sync off, just to turn them all back on later.

erm, disregard the above, just found daniels post.
Now I am pissed that it is the inconvenient to enable it. should be easier. they could have done it by setting the volume to zero and in this situation the vibration should turn off, too. the vibrate only is already implemented by tapping the bell icon, so this might be a good way for enabling silent mode.

I wish you could click the circle and open whatever app it is that's accessing your location. I think some websites on IE access your location in the background but I can't confirm it. The bubble pops up now and again even though I've disabled most everything in the background tasks.

I have my phone set to save my location every once and a whole in case I lose it. Having used tracking systems like Seek Droid and Find my iPhone, I know that tracking after the fact can be difficult. I imagine that is the reason it pops up for me as often as it does I imagine.

This. The most common reason for this icon appearing outside of you running an app that is location aware is the 'find my phone' feature in the OS. If you have that enabled (and you should) this grabs the location periodically to make sure it's tracked for use with that feature.

I think HSPA can be descibed as "3.5G" speeds. My HTC Titan was able to utilize this band frequently where I live. I think it was a small preliminary step for ATT before they were ready to go full HSPA+ (4G) and eventually LTE.

On our Lumia 920s on AT&T in Las Vegas, NV, we normally flop between LTE and 4G. We've also seen E and G. Up till now, I had thought the E and G ones were some kind of screen problem messing with the LTE and 4G icons. Now I know differently. Well, I know what the things stand for. But, I still don't know what it gets me: we're still dropping calls, having trouble making them, and not getting others.

I did. Oddly, the WindowsPhone page for WP7 has a legend, but I couldn't find the equivalent for WP8. WP7 and WP8 use slightly different icons for GPS location service in use. But I figured it was the same use. Thanks Nokia for the legend (and WPcentral for reposting).

That icon is actually used on WP7. For example, the Amazing Weather app uses it to show the location that so gps specific. On the Live Tile the icon also shows when providing the weather & temp of the gps location.